Refreshment

Refreshed.

That’s what people say. They go on vacation from work, and they get back and you see them in the hall, or talk to them on the phone, and you say “how was the vacation” and they say “I’m refreshed. I’m ready to get back at it.” Or you read a study saying how vacation is important for the mental health of workers because it refreshes them.

Me, personally, after a weeklong vacation, I get back to the office and start to work (normally digging out from under god knows how many emails, voicemails and interoffice memos) and, at some point, I look up and check the clock for the first time of the day, and it will say “9:36” or “10:09” and I think to myself “In no way, shape or form do I feel refreshed.” For me, vacation just reminds me that working kinda sucks when compared to life at home or on vacation.

In any event, my parents, who live about an hour away, took the kids and had them sleepover for the last three nights. My folks are good like that, taking the kids 2-3 times a year to give us a break, sometimes so we can get away for a quick vacation, other times so we can stay at home and “do projects.” We have high hopes at the start of these visits. “We’re going to paint the bathroom” we’ll claim and then we end up acting like lazy bums all weekend, gloriously sleeping in until 10 a.m. each weekend day and then still lying down for a nap in the afternoon or playing tennis together or actually having a beer with friends after work and marveling at how wonderful it is to do all that. So we get nothing done, really, and we didn’t get anything done this time either, but it was nice.

Just a few minutes ago I got home from picking the kids up this fine Sunday morning. At the end of these visits, I do start to miss the kids; I get a kick out of seeing how excited they are when I pick them up. You forget how they were a pain in the ass and whiny just 3 days ago and how you couldn’t wait to get rid of them. So the drive home was great, with us laughing and talking and singing and joking them telling me about the weekend. These weekends away do “refresh” me as a parent. And it “refreshes” your kids in some ways: they actually seem to appreciate hanging out with you.

For a while.

At some point, it wears off and the feeling of refreshment ends on both sides.

In fact, I’ve figured out a formula to figure out how long the refreshment lasts. Get out a pencil and paper! Take the number of days your kids were away and convert it into hours. Add 15 and then take the square root and add 12 to that. Then double it. Then take that piece of paper, crumple it up, get out a new piece of paper and write “90” on it.

That’s how long you’re refreshed. 90 minutes. Enjoy those 90 minutes, but don’t expect to get more than that.